Kristoffersson: You can’t win them all!

Johan Kristoffersson was characteristically philosophical in his assessment of round two of the 2026 Euro RX1 campaign last weekend (30-31 May), after a first corner crash in the Final at Nyirád saw him slip to second in the Drivers’ standings.

Having dominated the Final in the FIA European Rallycross Championship’s curtain-raising contest in Rīga three weeks earlier – leading home a commanding KMS one-two – Kristoffersson headed to Hungary as most people’s favourite to extend his winning start to the season. 

Such an outcome looked even more likely when the Swede was drawn on pole position for the last heat race in Q1, only for a lacklustre launch – his Volkswagen Polo’s current Achilles’ heel – to leave him trailing Juha Rytkönen and Patrick O’Donovan. While he successfully leapfrogged the young Brit, he could do nothing about the flying Finn, obliging him to settle for the third-fastest time of the session.

Q2 witnessed an epic duel between Kristoffersson and Andreas Bakkerud – two of the discipline’s undisputed greats – with the eight-time World Champion narrowly getting the nod after undercutting his long-time rival in the joker, vaulting to the top of the intermediate Ranking in the process.

He conceded that advantage in Q3 when, on a wet track following an earlier rain shower, Kristoffersson came off worse in a feisty first lap scrap with Bakkerud, falling to fifth place from pole and never managing to recover.

The next morning, the Arvika native somehow saved a wildly out-of-control moment as he got off-line a handful of corners into Q4, drawing upon every ounce of his considerable car control to gather it all up again – incredibly without either incident or delay. Going on to finish second, he duly cemented the same spot in the post-Qualifying classification.

After soaking up some early pressure from O’Donovan in the pair’s Quarter-Final, Kristoffersson ultimately edged away to record a comfortable race win – a result that he replicated at the Semi-Final stage, despite admitting he would have preferred to have finished second. The rationale behind that was wanting to avoid being on the outside of the front row of the grid for the Final. With good reason, as it transpired.

Matching pole-sitter Bakkerud away from the lights, the most successful driver of the sport’s modern era found himself forced wide into Turn One, with the consequent lack of grip sending him spinning spectacularly into the tyre barriers. Rejoining some way adrift of the back of the pack, he regained a position when countryman Casper Jansson made a mistake, but fifth was as good as it would get.

To rub salt into the wounds, victory for Bakkerud saw the Norwegian supplant Kristoffersson at the top of the title table. The erstwhile championship leader is already thinking about how to redress the balance on home soil at Höljes (4-5 July). 

“We didn’t come out on top in Hungary, but that’s just how it is,” the 37-year-old phlegmatically reflected in a post-race interview with Talking Loose. “It’s sport – you cannot win every time. Maybe it would have been a different story if we had won Q1 and then been able to start on the inside from there on. I’ve had a few of those weekends, too.

“That said, I really enjoy the challenge of using everything I have to try to win after emerging from the first couple of corners down the field – figuring out how close to stay to the cars in front, how much to stress the tyres, when to push, when to take the joker... 

“Saturday was a good day. Q2 was a lot of fun, although Q3 was the first time I’d ever driven in the wet at Nyirád and visibility was tricky. Then on Sunday, my target for the Semi-Final was to finish second, but it was so tight between Juha [Rytkönen] and Ole Christian [Veiby] on the last lap joker merge that there was no real possibility to slot in-between them.

“Unfortunately, in the Final, I was a bit too wide going into Turn One and ended up on the loose gravel on the outside, where it’s just so slippery. I had seen that exact scenario in my crystal ball, but I don’t know what I could have done differently. I felt that I went slowly into the corner, but the grip was even lower than expected, which caused me to lose the car.

“If we can start well and get out in front, our overall pace I think is very good. We have clearly improved our launches a little bit, which is promising and shows we’re taking steps forward, but they are still not good enough so we have more to do there. It didn’t work out for us overall in Hungary, but we will put our heads together and come back stronger.”